Diversity and death on television
The demise of “Sleepy Hollow” lead character Abbie Mills, played by Nicole Beharie, is the latest example of what fans have been calling out for months: the high fatality rate of minority and gay characters.
Sometimes it’s good for a show to be at the unexpected intersection of two seemingly unrelated trends in television, to spark a conversation that uses narrative specifics to connect with some larger sociopolitical issue. And sometimes it’s not. The death of lead character Abbie Mills, played by Nicole Beharie, during the third-season finale of Fox’s supernatural drama “Sleepy Hollow” provoked howls of rage from fans, many of whom could not see the point in the show continuing without the female half of its central team (it’s not clear if the show will get a fourth season).
But it also gave a new and pointed focus to a larger issue or, rather, the collision of two larger issues: death and diversity.
Many feel that TV’s attempt to increase cast and character diversity is increasingly undercut by its equally new willingness to kill off popular characters.
Especially those who are not straight white males.
For years, complaints about black men being used as zombie fodder have dogged “The Walking Dead” (which may or may not have just killed one of TV’s few Asian leads, Steven Yeun, who played Glenn), while the recent deaths of LGBT characters on a wide variety of shows seem to be resurrecting the Bury Your Gays and Dead Lesbian tropes. (Bury Your Tropes, Not Us is the new protest slogan.)
Long before this year’s finale season, death came to many non-straight-white-male characters, including several on the CW’s post-apocalyptic drama “The 100,” including Commander Lexa, played by Alycia Debnam-Carey; early April saw the death of so many fictional women that some critics felt compelled to list them, like soldiers lost in a strange new war.
Not that the list was necessary. Fueled perhaps by the superior attitude the television industry took during the recent #OscarsSoWhite controversy — look at us, we have “Empire,” “black-ish” and the oeuvre of Shonda Rhimes — fans have been steadily calling out the high fatality rate of minority characters for months now. (Including on “Empire,” in which a lesbian couple recently died in their attempt to kill Lucius.)
But when “Sleepy Hollow” killed Abbie, things got real.
For those who do not watch “Sleepy Hollow,” which is to say the vast majority of Americans, her death may seem the very definition of a non-event.
A freshman hit, the show seemed to lose its way in Season 2, and by Season 3, despite a change in showrunner, it was in how-did-this-happen free-fall.
So it’s not terribly surprising that Beharie, who had previously drawn attention in the films “24” and “Shame,” decided to leave, or even that the writers chose to explain that departure by death.
After all, why not? The finale, with its out-of-nowhere formation of a George Washington-sanctioned ghoul squad, was clearly a Hail Mary attempt at renewal, and certainly the American television audience is used to loss. Having survived Sean Bean’s beheading in “Game of Thrones,” Dan Stevens fleeing “Downton Abby” and Josh Charles’ murder in “The Good Wife,” we are a very different nation from the one that collectively collapsed on learning that Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s plane had been shot down over the sea of Japan after McLean Stevenson decided he’d had enough of “M*A*S*H.” Except. Except Abbie was one of two lead characters in “Sleepy Hollow.” More important, Beharie was one of the few nonwhite female leads on television.
And some believe that this was not just a case of a show failing and a star realizing she could do better elsewhere. Many “Sleepyheads” felt that Abbie’s story had been systematically sidelined in favor of those that focused on her partner, Ichabod Crane (Tom Mison), which made Abbie’s decision to die in order to save him infuriatingly symbolic: the black female sacrificed to sustain another white-malecentric storyline.
It’s a legitimate reading of the show, though perhaps not the only one. But the fact of the analysis is far more important than its detail.
After years of obsessive and often myopic deconstruction of certain series, the television audience is broadening its gaze to the bigger picture and realizing that the personal really is the political. The shows we watch are part of a larger presentation of modern life, and they matter both separately and as part of that whole.
Yes, there are more non-straight-white-male characters on television than ever, and perhaps they seem equally represented in your favorite show, but overall white men continue to rule, and everyone else exists mostly in the ensemble.
Which, in these days of death-at-anytime exposition and OMG pacing, makes them very vulnerable.
And though plenty of straight white guys get killed on television, too, when one falls, another inevitably springs up to take his place. We miss Josh Charles, but would we trade Jeffrey Dean Morgan to get him back? Probably not. Because Will’s death on “The Good Wife,” though upsetting, was not political.
And that’s what’s changed. With television’s new status comes increasing responsibility; if you’re going to be at the vanguard of popular culture, then you need to, well, be at the vanguard of popular culture.
It’s the stories that have to change, not just the window dressing. In life, women are not the minority, and when taken together, neither are people who are black, Asian, Latino, LGBT or any other definition that television still sees as “nontraditional.” These characters should not be used as seasoning or garland to give a white man’s story a little spice, a little color.
They should be telling their stories, too, in ways that don’t call for the ultimate sacrifice quite so often.